Mr. Speaker, I would like to address some of the issues the member raised. He talked about how the Conservative Party would cut spending, but that is not quite true.
What we would do is set priorities for what we think Canadians want. When we ran in the last election campaign of June 28, let me point out to the member that our package for the next five years was talking about $58 billion in tax cuts plus increased spending on things like the military and health care and some of these areas.
Here is what I think a responsible government would say: “These are our priorities. We need to spend more in certain areas, we need to cut in areas where we do not think Canadians' priorities are reflected, and we need to keep taxes as low as possible”.
That is where we are at. We think it is all a matter of setting priorities. When we talk about cutting spending, we mean cutting spending in areas that are not high priorities for our constituents. We do not mean cutting spending in areas that we think are high priorities.
The member talks about the Bloc's subamendment and why it was not supported. Of course there were a number of things in that subamendment, including the Kyoto file, which many people think is a lot of hot air. They think that spending money to buy credits in Russia is probably not a very good use of Canadian taxpayers' money.